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...and escalating deductibles and the through-the-roof drug costs. Insurance corporation/drug corporation-run, so-called health care SUCKS. It is NOT covering all. It is NOT covering medical costs well for those who can navigate the wildly complicated system. It is costing people too much, precisely because it is a profit-driven system, and many, many people are still being broken financially by health care costs, with or without insurance. Also, trying to get an insurance corporation to pay up, when you try to use your insurance, is often very difficult.
Endless paper work, phone calls, time, grief, emails, travel to offices--to get insurance and to use insurance--for people already working too many hours for low pay, and already beset with problems, from caring for their children, to caring for elderly parents, to finding a place to live after they're thrown out of their home by criminal mortgage speculators.
Yeah, caring for their elderly parents. Social Security doesn't cover living costs of the elderly, after the elderly worked all their lives paying into the system, and Medicare now has a 20% DEDUCTIBLE--20% you pay out of pocket, or have to get private insurance for--AND they ALSO take a big chunk out of your Social Security check as a Medicare PREMIUM. AND Medicare's 80% coverage DOESN'T cover everything your elderly parents may need--long stays in a convalescent home, additional physical therapy, medical equipment, home care. Not to mention the drug corporations utterly ripping off the Medicare system with off-the-planet drug costs, combined with the big deductibles that the corporate drug insurance plans charge, ever escalating if you have to use your drug plan.
How's that for Reagan-Clinton "trickle down"? It's more like Ross Perot's BIG SUCKING SOUND, in this case all wealth vacuumed up by the wealthy, at the expense of the old and the sick, and all the rest of us.
There is no question that the AFFORDABLE Care Act provides some ("incremental"
improvements, such as people with pre-existing conditions can now get insured and parents can keep their older children on their insurance plan, and that health insurance is portable (from job to job to unemployment). (Har!) It is positive that many people can now get health insurance, who couldn't get it before. But the ACA is NOT "affordable" for many people, and the lack of a public option is fatal to the plan, in my opinion. Profit-driven health care is inevitably and inherently bad. It cannot and will not produce health care for all.
Medicare itself needs serious reform, AND MANDATED COST CONTROLS, WITH CRIMINAL PENALTIES. But it is still much better than the ACA, which puts your life and the lives of your loved ones, and the lives of all citizens, into the hands of an insurance corporation operative whose object is to DENY you care. That's what the insurance industry is all about--DENYING enough claims to make big profits. And, if you don't have the time to fight them, and you can't afford a lawyer, then fuck you!
A public option might have remedied the ACA sufficiently to mitigate some of this profiteering. Reformed Medicare (with cost controls including drugs, dumping drug insurance and the extractive, unfair, creeping premiums and deductibles, and expanding and modernizing covered costs, such as medical marijuana) would be infinitely better than the ACA.
Bernie Sanders wants to expand Social Security (to provide a decent living to the elderly, who paid for it!). He can start by ENDING the Medicare premium that is deducted from Social Security checks. That is THEFT!
The reason that ACA sucks is that insurance, drug and other corporations OWN most of our Democratic elected officials, as well as owning Republicans, through the filthy campaign contribution and lobbying systems. Sanders has pledged to end that. This was a no-brainer before the Reagan junta. $$$ shouldn't control politics. What has happened? Has a strange disease hit our Democratic Party leaders, sucking the brains out of their skulls, and the only thing left is the lizardy part of their brain matter, and that is all about selfishness and greed? It is a no-brainer for Democrats (or should be). And it is also a no-brainer for democracy itself.
De-corrupt the system, and guess what? Things will start getting at least fair, and we might even become a decent society again.
